Evaluation Activity 7

Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Here is our preliminary task which we produced at the start of the year:

Here is our final opening sequence:

From when we produced our preliminary task at the start of the year to creating our opening sequence, there are many things which I have learnt in order for our opening sequence to be of much better quality so it is easy for the audience to watch. I have learnt many new editing skills and camera skills. Looking back to our preliminary task, there are so many mistakes which we made without realizing I didn't do as much paper work for my preliminary task because i thought i would be fine, i was arrogant and thought its only filming a few shots, hows paper work going to help only to realize it cost me severely as my preliminary was a disaster but i learnt from this and did over 3 times more paper work for my opening sequence so working off my preliminary helped me prepare myself and this is all shown through my blog as there's hardly an posts for preliminary and loads for my main task.   I used this to help me look over our opening sequence to make sure it was made upto a high standard. 

This screenshot has been taken from our preliminary task and the reason I have decided to talk about this particular shot is because as you can see in the reflection, a camera and tripod being held by a person can clearly be seen. This ruins the whole scene as it just takes away the attention from the character and does not look very professional at all. We did learn from this as shown below.

This is a screenshot from our final opening sequence which is a long shot showing the location of the character and his legs. The reason I have decided to compare this to the preliminary task screenshot is because we learnt that during filming, we need to focus on what is going to actually be seen on camera and ask you can see in this shot, there is no-one or nothing around the character which puts all focus on him. This  creates such a good look as it shows the cast have taken time out to ensure all shots are perfect without anything ruining it. 

Our preliminary task consisted of many camera angles and shots however they were very basic because we did not think to experiment with the camera and find out more. Although the shots were basic, we were happy with them at the time until we found out we could shoot many more different camera angles. We researched different camera angles and shots and decided to use ones which we found interesting for example, a point of view shot. Here are a few screenshots which show where we used the point of view shots in our opening sequence. 

This shot was taken during the interrogation scene which is my character's point of view.

This shot was also taken during the interrogation scene however this is Raqeebul's view.

This screenshot is blurry due to the shot being so intense as this is when Raqeebul punches my character but does it towards to camera instead to make it look more realistic.

This shot was taken during the climbing scene which is my character's view.

In our preliminary task, we put together a script which the characters found easy to follow so we thought it would be good to continue this for our opening sequence which is why speech is involved. We thought by having no speech in our opening sequence, it could take away the atmosphere we intended to create.

There is a clear difference between our preliminary task and our final opening sequence as you can see as soon as you start playing them both. We did not render our preliminary task which is why it is such bad quality and the whole video looks blurry and so we later on found out how to do this and applied it to our opening sequence. This has raised it's standards making it look very professional. Also, we did not add any effects in our preliminary as each shot has just been placed next to the following one which does not make the filming look consistent but quite ammateur instead. We decided to add effects to our opening sequence so that each scene would flow and so the audience would be kept interested. Overall, there are many things which I have learnt from due to the mistakes made in our preliminary task however I have overcome this by making sure I did not make the same mistakes when it came to producing our opening sequence.